João Hespanha

Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

805-893-3262

hespanha [at] ece [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

Institute Role
Member of Building & Design Solutions Group and Computing Solutions Group

Role in Affiliated Centers
Associate Director of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation; Member of the Center for Energy Efficiency Design and the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing

Research
João Hespanha’s current research interests include hybrid and switched systems; the modeling and control of communication networks; distributed control over communication networks (also known as networked control systems); the use of vision in feedback control; and stochastic modeling in biology. One application of his research focuses on airflow and control algorithms for optimizing the flow and mixing of forced air cooling in computational facilities for greater energy efficiency.

Biography
João Hespanha received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and applied science from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 1998. From 1999 to 2001, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He moved to UC Santa Barbara in 2002, where he currently holds a Professor position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Hespanha is Associate Director for the Center for Control, Dynamical-systems, and Computation (CCDC), Vice-Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB). From 2004—2007 he was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Hespanha is the recipient of Yale University’s Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize for exceptional achievement in research in Engineering and Applied Science, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2005 best paper award at the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, the 2005 Automatica Theory/Methodology best paper prize, the 2006 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award and the 2009 Ruberti Young Researcher Prize. Hespanha is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE distinguished lecturer since 2007.